The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  First they decided to get a second medical opinion. The opinion they sought was that of Ahmed Khadr’s friend and fellow Egyptian, Dr Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s personal physician and key lieutenant, who was regarded in al Qaeda circles as a ‘medical genius’. A conference was arranged at the Khadr family’s home so that Rabiah could brief Zawahiri on the child’s condition. Zawahiri is described elsewhere as a ‘cerebral, taciturn man in his early fifties, his face framed by heavy glasses, a beard and a white turban’. In keeping with Salafi practice, Rabiah did not see his face.

  ‘When he came, I was behind a curtain and he was on the other side. Some of the women sat with me, and some men sat with him’, she recalls. Their meeting lasted about ten minutes, with Zawahiri speaking polished English throughout. ‘He was very professional and soft-spoken. We spoke about the case and he agreed with my findings.’

  Rabiah was well aware that Zawahiri was no ordinary doctor. ‘Of course I knew who he was—everyone knew who he was. By this time there had already been an amalgamation of (his organisation) al Jihad with al Qaeda and he had taken the bai’at to Osama bin Laden.’ It was Zawahiri who had penned the 1998 fatwah authorising the killing of Americans and their allies, which heralded the onset of al Qaeda’s war on the West. However, on this occasion and for Rabiah’s purpose, he was simply a doctor—and a real one, at that.

  ‘I remember him saying something like, “Umm Mohammed, I think you have more expertise than I in this field”’, says Rabiah. ‘I remember being really embarrassed—he was a real doctor and I was a fake one, but he was treating me as if I was a colleague. I felt like digging a hole and burying myself.’ At the end of their discussion, Zawahiri endorsed Rabiah’s view that the child should be taken to North America for treatment. The family obtained the required religious ruling and Zaynab left soon afterwards with Sofia for Canada.

  Rabiah’s conferral with Ayman al Zawahiri cemented her status as a trusted insider in the jihadist elite, whose expertise was valued and sought by the Taliban and al Qaeda. The Taliban regime now provided her and her family with their own house in Karti Parwan, in a tree-lined street with open drains and turbaned vendors squatting in the dust selling plump oranges from wooden carts. The house was a former colonial-era three-storey mansion, commandeered by the Taliban and divided into apartments. Whatever grandeur it might once have possessed had long since faded, its walls now pockmarked with shell holes and the scars of automatic rifle fire and most of its windows smashed, although the interior still boasted 6-metre-high ceilings and black-and-white chequerboard ceramic tiles on the bathroom floor. It was occupied by three families of Taliban sympathisers and known among its neighbours as ‘Beit al Arab’—the house of Arabs. As in the 1980s, any foreigner who came to join the jihad was automatically classed as ‘Arab’.

  ‘Someone had gone to the Taliban and said, “There’s this woman who’s come from Australia, she’s a single mother, she’s a muhajir, she has four kids, she needs somewhere to stay”’, says Rabiah. ‘I was given a house, not because I was some important terrorist on the al Qaeda hierarchy but because it’s Islamic law. I was a muhajir. I was a woman alone with children who had left wherever I was for the sake of Allah, and it was incumbent upon them to house me.’

  Rabiah and the four children were allotted five rooms for themselves, palatial compared to much that they were used to, as well as use of the third-storey rooftop, which afforded scenic views of the city and mountains. ‘In winter you could see the snow-covered mountains all the way to the Hindu Kush, it was absolutely beautiful’, Rabiah recalls.

  In the back garden were fruit trees whose branches were festooned with magnetic tape ripped from videocassettes seized by the Taliban. Nearby was a pile of television sets that had been confiscated and smashed, leaving empty shells the smaller children liked to climb into and play at being actors on television, to the delight of those who sat around watching. Another television set dangled from the branch of a tree. Rabiah found all this funny and thought the tape in the trees looked ‘pretty’ as it glittered in the sunlight. Not so amusing was a dank, spider-infested cellar under the house, which was said to have been used as a prison by the Taliban when they first swept to power. Graffiti was daubed in blood on the walls: ‘May Allah forgive me’; and next to it, scrawled in another hand, ‘There is no Allah’.

  Because it was in ‘a good area’, the house had electricity for about four hours a day but the current was so weak that in the evenings it flickered like candlelight. Sometimes when they switched on the Soviet-era washing machine, it would merely groan and refuse to operate, as Rabiah recalls. ‘You were always getting electrocuted, you’d put your hand on it and “zzt!” It was quite common that there would be no on-off switch and no plug on the electricity cord. You would just poke the cord with the wires sticking out of it into the wall.’ They had a pump known as a ‘sanyo’ (whether or not it was that Japanese brand) to pump water from an underground well to a tank on the roof that fed taps in the kitchen. But the water was so rank it could only be used for washing and cooking. The boys had to travel half an hour by taxi with jerry cans twice a week to get drinking water from a spring outside Kabul.

  Rabiah made curtains and matching bedspreads and bought wooden bases to keep their mattresses out of the dust, and they soon settled in. ‘We were there in that house for a year. Apart from the hardship of living in one of the poorest places on Earth, it was like when you get off a plane in Australia and think, it’s good to be home—that’s how we felt about Afghanistan. It was the place where we belonged. We forgot who we were for a while. Immigrants should never forget that that’s what they are. I broke a rule, an unwritten rule, that a muhajir doesn’t ever settle down.’

  Rabiah set up a basic medical clinic in a room of the house to cater to the ‘Arab’ community of Kabul, which she says numbered more than one thousand families. She did pregnancy tests, checkups and pre-natal care, using a Doppler she had brought from Australia to monitor the unborn babies’ heartbeats. She prescribed and dispensed treatments for diarrhoea, malaria, cholera, hepatitis and gastric diseases, all of which were endemic in Kabul. ‘I became a very good diagnostician, but I was very aware of my limitations’, she says. ‘If I didn’t know what was wrong or they needed a consultation or a follow-up with a real doctor, I would take them. I would always refer things that I didn’t know about, or if they needed specialist attention.’

  When Rabiah’s pregnant patients were ready to deliver she accompanied them to the Saj Gul women’s hospital, a grimy sprawl of cement-block buildings south of the Kabul River. She doubled as translator for many of the Arab women who spoke neither English nor Dari, and frequently delivered the babies herself. The hospitals were starved of funds and supplies, but the relatively affluent foreigners could afford to bring their own, and Rabiah would brief them ahead of time: ‘Right, you’ve got to have an operation tomorrow. You have to bring three packets of gauze, a saline drip, a canula, and a bottle of Savlon.’ At one point she had to go into hospital herself for an appendectomy. The conditions were so gruesome that when the time came to have her stitches out she refused to go back, instead giving her granddaughter Huda a scalpel, tweezers and step-by-step instructions on suture removal.

  The foreigners known as ‘the Arabs’ formed an exclusive society of their own, which held itself largely aloof from the broader Afghan community, reflecting tensions that dated back to the jihad against the Russians. Many Afghans resented the intrusion of these ‘Wahhabis’ with their alien dogma, language and customs, while the newcomers, especially those from Middle Eastern countries, often looked down on the Afghans as peasants with an inferior understanding of Islam. Rabiah was annoyed by this divide and mostly blamed the Arabs for failing to appreciate their Afghan hosts.

  Later, during the ‘war on terror’, the people who called themselves ‘Afghan-Arabs’ in Afghanistan in this period would be classified en masse as ‘al Qaeda’. The reality is somewhat less clearcut. They we
re certainly close to al Qaeda, but not necessarily al Qaeda members themselves, and not necessarily involved in bin Laden’s jihad against the West. ‘The majority of people we knew weren’t al Qaeda—whatever “al Qaeda” is supposed to be’, says Rabiah. ‘They weren’t opposed to it, but they weren’t necessarily a part of it. They were just people who had gone to live in an Islamic state. Would they have fought? Most definitely—fought to hang on to what they had achieved. And anyone who was willing to fight was immediately labelled “al Qaeda”.’

  Since the jihad against the Russians, the Afghan-Arabs had looked to bin Laden as their emir. But not all of them supported his fatwah against the United States and its allies, which was a source of much consternation among them. Some were all for it, while others saw it as a potentially suicidal diversion from their article of faith—achieving Islamic law—and lobbied strongly against it. Many sympathised with bin Laden’s vendetta but had no personal stake or involvement in it. Rabiah’s view—as she states it (and in two years of research I have found nothing to disprove this)—was that the jihad against America was ‘Osama’s war’. She had some sympathy for it, but regarded it as a quite separate undertaking from her own quest to help build an Islamic state. Like all the Afghan-Arabs, notwithstanding their differences, she admired bin Laden’s dedication and relied on his largesse. ‘I don’t know anyone who opposed him’, she says. ‘What was there to oppose? He was building roads, and the school—he probably paid for half of it. No one was against Osama, there was nothing to be against.’

  By the time Rabiah arrived in Kabul, the Arabs had established their own school, funded by bin Laden and run on a Saudi curriculum. The Abu Bakr school catered only for boys but a girls’ school soon opened as well, named after the Prophet’s first wife Khadija and situated in the former embassy district of Wazir Akhbar Khan, where entire streets of former diplomatic missions had been taken over by the Taliban and al Qaeda. The school went from kindergarten to year ten and pupils attended six days a week, studying a mixture of secular and Islamic subjects. After months of studying at home, Aminah and Huda were delighted to be back at school. ‘It was so exciting, the girls were so happy’, Rabiah remembers. Huda, who had her grandmother’s bent for mischief, earned the ire of the school authorities by encouraging her entire class of nine-year-old girls to climb a large tree in the schoolyard, barefoot except for their mandatory white socks, which became caked in mud and tree bark.

  The school was established by a group of women in Rabiah’s circle who called themselves the ‘women’s committee’ of the muhajirin. The committee—of which Rabiah says she was ‘too busy’ to be a member—also arranged classes for the women to study the Quran, hadith and Islamic law. Rabiah herself took charge of a class on tafsir (interpreting the Quran) for the English-speaking women. The committee had had to lobby bin Laden to secure funds for the school, as Rabiah recalls. ‘Sheikh Osama thought that all the girls could study to year six and that would be enough, because he felt that by year six they’d have command of the Arabic language, enough to bring up their children and learn about Islam.’ This was apparently not bin Laden’s blanket opinion on education for women, but his view on what was appropriate in Afghanistan at the time. However, the women’s committee vehemently disagreed. (Bin Laden’s own wives probably disagreed with him too; one of them had a PhD in child psychology, while another had a doctorate in Arabic grammar.) The women resolved to persuade bin Laden he was wrong. As Rabiah tells it: ‘One of the older women marched over there and said it was ridiculous, what was he thinking? If all the women only studied to year six—what about doctors? Dentists? Teachers?’ Bin Laden was reportedly persuaded and the girls’ school was extended as far as year twelve.

  Bin Laden and his wives lived in the desert city of Kandahar and rarely ventured to Kabul. (Contrary to a report that Rabiah was the midwife for one of his babies, she says she never met or treated any of bin Laden’s wives.) However, stories of the Sheikh’s benevolence, humility and ascetic lifestyle were swapped eagerly among the women in Kabul. It was said that each Friday bin Laden would gather his wives around him and ask if any of them had a complaint about how he was treating them. The al Qaeda women would roll their eyes and bemoan their own husbands’ lack of such consideration. There were stories of how bin Laden would not allow his children to drink refrigerated water for fear it would ‘soften’ them—Rabiah adopted the same habit—and of how, when he was travelling, he would insist that his elderly Afghani cook sleep in a bed while he slept with only a blanket on the bare floor of his tent. At the festival of Eid al Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, bin Laden would send a live sheep to every family so they could celebrate the feast. He had done the same thing in Pabbi, according to Rabiah.

  ‘Osama would buy a truckload of sheep and send them around to people like me. I think I ended up with about three. I didn’t want to kill them, they were so cute. But my son convinced me they wanted to sacrifice themselves for Allah.’

  The women’s circle in Kabul included at least one al Qaeda luminary—the wife of Dr Ayman al Zawahiri, whose name was Azza Nowair, though her friends called her Umm Fatima. She was the daughter of a wealthy Egyptian clan and a philosophy student at Cairo University where Zawahiri studied medicine. They married at Cairo’s Continental-Savoy Hotel and later had five children, including a girl with Down syndrome. Umm Fatima was a member of the women’s committee that had established the new school, and a trusted friend to Rabiah.

  ‘Umm Fatima was an amazing woman and the epitome of a lady’, Rabiah says. ‘She was very intelligent, she was funny, very dry humour, and always positive. She could be speaking to a group of women, and she had this uncanny ability to make you feel she was speaking directly to you.’

  Zawahiri and Umm Fatima lived in an expansive but rundown colonial-era manse—probably a former diplomatic house— in the embassy quarter of Wazir Akhbar Khan. They shared the house with another family who lived in the section upstairs. The house had double-glass doors that opened onto an overgrown English garden, but like most of the Arab houses it was virtually empty inside. Rabiah recalls that the Zawahiris were the only Arabs in Kabul with security guards. (After the al Qaeda bombing of the American warship USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, bin Laden separated his key leaders so that in the event of an American attack they could not all be eliminated at once. His military chief, Mohammed Atef, was moved to another location in Kandahar, while his deputy Zawahiri was headquartered in Kabul.)

  Zawahiri was never there when Rabiah visited Umm Fatima at home. She remembers arriving on one occasion to find her friend dressed ‘the way Arab women usually dress up when their husbands are at home—like how Western women dress when they go out’.

  ‘Is your husband home?’ Rabiah asked in surprise.

  ‘No’, Umm Fatima sighed.

  ‘Are you expecting him?’

  ‘I always expect him.’

  ‘That must be hard. If he doesn’t come, don’t you get disappointed?’

  ‘Well I guess I’d rather have him not come and be disappointed, than have him come and find me looking like something the cat dragged in.’

  Like many in their circle, Umm Fatima was perturbed at Rabiah’s marital status. Rabiah was a woman of forty-seven with six children. Being unmarried was considered an unnatural state, which detracted from one’s practice of Islam. Rabiah’s friends were constantly trying to rectify the anomaly, and Zawahiri’s wife raised it at one of their get-togethers.

  ‘There is someone interested in marrying you’, Umm Fatima announced.

  Rabiah laughed. ‘I’m too old for that sort of thing.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Umm Mohammed. You and I are the same age and I’m certainly not too old for it!’

  Rabiah politely rejected the advance. She still wonders who her friend had in mind.

  We are opposed to the Taliban because of their opposition to human rights and their despicable treatment of women and children and great lack of respect for hu
man dignity.

  US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright,

  18 November 1997

  Initially welcomed by the international community as a force for stability, the Taliban had swiftly become a pariah regime, denounced by Western governments and subjected to United Nations sanctions, principally because of its stance on education, the treatment of women and—increasingly—its protection of the fugitive bin Laden.

  On coming to power, the Taliban had declared, ‘We want to live a life like the Prophet lived 1,400 years ago … We want to recreate the time of the Prophet.’ And so they banned television, music, videos, cards, chess, football, high heels, the shaving of beards, flying of kites and keeping pigeons. Women were banned from working except in the medical field and from leaving their homes without being covered in a burka. A Taliban decree explained that ‘Islam as a rescuing religion has determined specific dignity for women’, while the governor of Herat announced: ‘We have given women their rights that God and his Messenger have instructed, that is to stay in their homes and to gain religious instruction in hijab’. (The word hijab is used here to mean ‘seclusion’.)

  After capturing Kabul, the Taliban had shut down 63 schools, affecting 103 000 girls and 148 000 boys. By December 1998 UNICEF reported that nine in ten girls and two in three boys were not enrolled in school. (Most of the boys in school were attending religious madrassas.) The Taliban leadership claimed it would reopen schools once a segregated system was in place, because ‘women must be completely segregated from men’. By 1999, schools had begun reopening, mostly in rural areas. A Western aid agency reported that 30 000 female students were enrolled at 600 schools it sponsored, and that ‘there are parts of rural areas in Afghanistan today, where there are more girls in school than ever before in Afghan history’. Education for girls still ended at the age of twelve.